Tusk Editor's Note: 12/20

Friday

Dec 20, 2013 at 12:01 AM

I made the statement years ago, which is often quoted, that ‘80 percent of life is showing up.’ People used to always say to me that they wanted to write a play, they wanted to write a movie, they wanted to write a novel, and the couple of people that did it were 80 percent of the way to having something happen. All the other people struck out ... They couldn’t do it, that’s why they don’t accomplish a thing — they don’t do the thing — so once you do it, if you actually write your film script, or write your novel, you are more than halfway towards something good happening. So that was my biggest life lesson that has worked. All others have failed me.”

By Mark Hughes CobbEntertainment Editor

I made the statement years ago, which is often quoted, that ‘80 percent of life is showing up.’ People used to always say to me that they wanted to write a play, they wanted to write a movie, they wanted to write a novel, and the couple of people that did it were 80 percent of the way to having something happen. All the other people struck out ... They couldn’t do it, that’s why they don’t accomplish a thing — they don’t do the thing — so once you do it, if you actually write your film script, or write your novel, you are more than halfway towards something good happening. So that was my biggest life lesson that has worked. All others have failed me.” That would be Woody Allen, a divisive figure to some because he married this girl that was the adopted child of another woman he once dated. Try to put aside those feelings for a moment, as well as the thought that said relationship with said wife has now lasted more than 20 years, and let’s get back to the thing.In probably the most serious film ever about writing, 1987’s “Throw Momma from the Train,” Billy Crystal’s Larry repeats the phrase: “A writer writes. Always.” The gag is that Larry’s an ex-writer, having completed one novel that was somehow — it’s never explained — stolen by his ex-wife, who published it under her own name, to huge success, which she then rubs in his face with every possible talk-show opportunity.For all the months since, Larry’s been stuck on the opening line of his follow-up: “The night was .... ” What? Moist? Steamy? Humid?Hatred and envy blind him, paralyze him, transmogrify him into an ex-writer, teaching a class of semi-literate wanna-bes, who, irony again, are actually writing. It’s crap, what they’re churning out — one types Tom Clancy-style submarine thrillers, but without knowing names for things, sprinkled with similes such as “His guts oozed nice, like a malted” — but it is work. It’s action. It’s showing up.The late and wonderful Barry Hannah once told me about the B.I.C. method, which is all he figured he could teach students at the University of Alabama, and later at Ole Miss in Oxford. It’s not the cheap writing utensil, but an acronym for putting your Butt In a Chair. Once seated, writing will happen. Usually.In true Hannah-legend fashion, when I asked if he still taught via the B.I.C. method, some 10 or 12 years after that first interview, he professed not to recall it, but admitted it sounded like something he might have said. Allen later claimed he meant, or said, that 80 percent of success, not life, is showing up, even though the life quote is punchier. Sometimes writers don’t know when to stop re-writing.Larry breaks out of his funk, eventually, from being drawn in by one of his less-promising students, Danny DeVito’s childlike Owen, who in mostly unchildlike fashion, wants Larry to kill his mom, who is, to be fair, a horror show, a monster. Owen gets confused easily. Wanting to write mysteries, Owen would create two characters, one of whom is dead on page one, so, as Larry says, it’s no great mystery whodunnit. Motivation boils down to “A guy in a hat killed another guy in a hat.” So Larry suggests Owen learn from the master of suspense by sitting in on a Hitchcock film festival, showing “Strangers on a Train” (screenplay by the genius Raymond Chandler, based on the novel by the equally talented Patricia Highsmith), in which the two dudes on the locomotive discuss swapping murders of respective objets d’ hatred, so as to remove suspicion, remove motive. One believes the talk is academic, a sort of cynical exercise; the other is all action.Owen takes Larry’s movie nudge as a hint and goes after the ex-wife, urging Larry to startle or otherwise shove his mom into a grave. Larry is, of course, aghast and springs into action to save both women from Owen’s little misfiring brain.Bad things happen, though nothing irreversible, and both Larry and Owen get published. Showing up is action. Life is action, not vague thoughts or wishes.So an early New Year’s resolution for all: Show up.

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